'Sweetheart Swindler' has date with prison

Friday

Oct 5, 2012 at 12:01 AMOct 5, 2012 at 10:30 AM

For nearly five decades, Tonya Weiss has picked the pockets and stolen the souls of old men. Now, having spent much of her time since the mid-1960s in jails and state and federal prisons in Ohio and Florida, Weiss, 69, is headed to prison again.

Holly Zachariah, The Columbus Dispatch

For nearly five decades, Tonya Weiss has picked the pockets and stolen the souls of old men.

She met her marks in department-store parking lots and found them through their classified ads for companionship. She has wormed her way into the lives of the sick because families believed her to be a trusted caregiver.

One time, she simply knocked on the door of a man grieving the death of his mother and said she was an old friend. Before long, he was writing her big checks.

Authorities call her the “Sweetheart Swindler” and say she probably has stolen millions of dollars in her lifetime, if you count what has never been reported to police.She has for years been one of those notorious criminals that investigators swap stories about over Friday-night beers: “ Oh, yeah? Well, the first time I met Tonya Weiss ...”

Now, having spent much of her time since the mid-1960s in jails and state and federal prisons in Ohio and Florida, Weiss, 69, is headed to prison again.

Fairfield County Common Pleas Judge Chris Martin sentenced Weiss on Monday to two years and eight months in prison after a three-day jury trial and a conviction on charges of telecommunications fraud and identity theft.

“What a pedophile is to children, Tonya Weiss is to the elderly,” said investigator Dave Kessler, who has worked on Weiss’ cases since he came to Ohio in 2000 to work for the state attorney general’s office. He now is an investigator with the Fairfield County prosecutor’s office and is one of the nation’s leading experts on elder-abuse prevention.

“She works so hard at these scams, at these cons, that in her heart she believes she is entitled to everything she takes,” Kessler said.

Crimes among her previous convictions include stealing nearly $500,000 from an elderly man in Florida and, later, more than $200,000 from the mail sent to patients at the Columbus Alzheimer’s Care Center, where she worked as the business manager.

Weiss had last spent five years in prison for defrauding two elderly men out of $30,000 while corresponding with them from the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. She was serving time there after being convicted in 2000 of taking thousands of dollars from a 75-year-old widower in Ross County.

She was released in 2008 and immediately married an old family friend, said Kessler, who had investigated both the Ross and Union county cases. It was the new marriage that kick-started this latest case.

Weiss quickly rang up credit-card charges and tinkered with her husband’s finances. He and his relatives noticed. He divorced her.

So, Kessler says, Weiss took on the alias of Wanda Elliott and began a campaign to discredit the man and another woman — a parishioner from his church who had lived with them. Over time, she consistently and repeatedly called schools, social-service agencies and police agencies in multiple counties to spread lies about them and to try to get them in trouble.

She was living in New Holland, on the Fayette/Pickaway county line at the time. But in her quest to find an authority who would listen, she called Job and Family Services in Fairfield County. A supervisor recognized the caller’s voice as that of Weiss. It was the voice on recordings of Weiss that Kessler uses during his elder-abuse training sessions.

Weiss agrees but says she has changed. In court on Monday, she admitted that she had lived a lavish life — big, fancy homes and Cadillacs and sports cars. Things have been different recently, she swears. She said she lives on welfare now and is reformed.

Kessler doesn’t buy it. This case will keep Weiss in prison for fewer than three years. He says he has six until he can retire. He figures to meet up with her again.